Chaz Ebert, the film producer and now widow to film critic Roger Ebert, is currently working with Shatterglass Films to produce a movie about Emmett Till’s life and mother. Filming is set to start in Mississippi next year.

Reported by Deadline, the film’s script will be based off the 2004 novel Death of Innocence, The Story of The Hate Crime That Changed America, written by Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley, with journalist Christopher Benson.

Emmett Till was only 14 in 1955 when he was kidnapped from his bed while visiting his great uncle among other relatives in Mississippi, for speaking/whistling at 21-year-old white woman Carolyn Bryant. Till was brutally tortured, shot, then finally got a barb wire attached to his neck with a 70 pound cotton gin and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

The men (the woman’s half brother and husband) were charged with murder but later acquitted by an all white jury. The incredible part about this all is how strong his mother was. She insisted on Emmett’s funeral be an open casket for the world to see what the white people continue to get away with. Pictures of Till’s bloated, mutilated body were in every magazine and newspaper at the time and tens of thousands flocked to see it in person. Chaz Ebert went on to say:

The full Emmett Till story needs to be told now and told well as a narrative for our times, given all that is happening on American streets today, and Shatterglass Films are the people to tell it.